Trans*forming Mom – who is “transforming” her 15 year old daughter into a lifetime program of dependency on sterilizing medical treatments designed to disguise her true sex, as well as “transforming” her into a 15 year-old recipient * of a medically-unnecessary double mastectomy- classifies the comments left on the GenderTrender post as “the most harsh criticism” she has ever received.

Trans*forming Mom describes her background being raised as a Christian Fundamentalist and relates her experience of receiving a lifetime of violence and abuse from men. “I had not only experienced violence, objectification, abuse, and assault from men beginning at the earliest stages of my life, but i had seen other important women in my life experience this too,” she writes.

Mom writes about her daughter’s distress at her failure to adequately perform, or find satisfaction in, oppressive sexist gender roles assigned to females. “He has shared that, because he didn’t feel comfortable as a girl, he didn’t have an identity. So, he threw himself into ballet and “being the perfect daughter” as a way to distract himself from the reality of his male-ness. He has told me that there is only one thing that he ever felt that he had to do, and that was to be a girl, and when he allowed himself to accept that he was not one, he felt that he failed. This breaks my heart. And he wasn’t taught or told that he had to “be a girl” in any certain way, or be any type of girl. He just knew he was expected to be a girl because that is what we told him and how we raised him based upon his birth assignment, and he knew he was not one,” she writes.

Trans*formingMom makes repeated analogies between the medicalization of gender and homosexuality. She compares irreversible pediatric sterilization and surgeries on dysphoric children to young children who identify themselves as homosexual and implies that feminists should get right on board. For the record, I don’t know any feminists, gays, or lesbians including myself who suggest that children or adolescents should make permanent lifetime decisions regarding their future sexual interests or self-concepts. Trans*formingMom compares trans people who de-transition or come to reject genderism with the “ex-gays” of religious fundamentalism.

Mom also seems to have confused me with Dirt, since the post in question was re-blogged from Dirt’s excellent site.

The saddest part of her post for me was in the comments where she explains the lengths she went to convincing her daughter not to seek out and read the comments, and the blog, that Mom is writing about. Her daughter is old enough to opt into lifetime medical dependence and cosmetic disablility and sterility and breast removal, but is not old enough to be exposed to the world of feminist thought on “Gender”.

So she posts the same standard explanation of “this is what trans* is, and innate gender identity is really a thing! Really! It is!” as if she just thinks none of us have come across that same exact explanation a million times over already? Seriously?

Trust me. We have. We don’t buy the argument, full stop.

I fail to see how that entire narrative does anything BUT reify the gender binary. It is, again, built on the idea that there’s some “cis” (i.e. “normal,” right?) relationship of brain process to genitalia. Why should there be?

She even goes so far as to say “the mind of a boy.” What is that, precisely? No one has ever been able to explain just what it is that makes a “mind of a boy” or “mind of a girl.”

But yeah. I don’t, in fact, believe in innate gender as a thing. I don’t believe in the “born in the wrong body” arguments. And it’s not because I haven’t heard them before.

FWIW I found it interesting that (1) the gynecologist said similarly, and (2) turns out the child is romantically attracted to males.

How is this not child abuse? Trans*forming mom has some effing nerve! Ignorant!!!! People are ignorant for not believing in the fairy tales that states chopping off one’s tits and scraping out one’s uterus automatically makes them men? I’m going to stop typing because if I continue I’m gonna burst!

I can’t bring myself to read her blog without getting upset. If a woman/girl wants to wear “guys” clothing (even though in my opinion clothes are clothes and have no sex attached to them) go right ahead or if she wants to have a buzz cut; again go right ahead…my opinion there’s no need to mutilate one’s body.

Demonstrating (yet again) that neither mother nor daughter get it…”I was talking with my oldest son about all of this earlier this evening, and when i began trying to explain the whole situation, he stopped me and said “Wait, what? How can you be a lesbian radical feminist and not believe in transgenderism?” In his way of thinking that sounded like the most progressive thing one could be, and the idea that they could reject trans people totally blew his mind.”

What part of disagreeing with mutilation and lifelong dependence on various pharmacological substances are they missing? Jeezusfuckingchrist! What part of BIOLOGY FUCKING MATTERS do they not grasp?

Sadly I envision that girl waking up a few years down the road and wondering why she her mom let her self-mutilate and how she can undo the damage they want to let the medical community inflict upon her…

She STILL doesn’t get it…posting today that “And for a brief moment i thought i should consider what they were saying, but their angry and hateful presentation made it clear that they have serious internal issues and their “arguments” were easily dismissible.”

Once again, the person who SHOULD have been a responsible parent decides to ignore opinions over what she essentially perceives as a tone issue. In other words, if it isn’t all sunshine and lollipops and in total concert with the initial belief set she holds, then it is all to easy to dismiss by putting one’s fingers in the ears and walking away whilst going “LA-LA-LA I can’t hear you.”

And once again in a later comment, also this afternoon, she still insists on conflating sex and gender. I could have been inclined to chalk that up to a poor effort by the public school system, but considering her claim to have home-schooled her daughter, I honestly believe she thinks they are one and the same. That was also the response where she claims to have been involved with a feminist group a decade or so ago and that twanz never came up…hmm, one wonders if that might have been because twanz wasn’t trying their damndest to erase female and female-only spaces a decade ago? Energies get channeled to where the fucking problems are…and twanz-jacktivists doing their damndest to erase female and to codify gender stereotypes into law are a problem IMO.

The “tone” issue is very important. I’ve read both blogs, and I am very confused about what I think – but all my emotions are leaning towards the mum, because her tone, and that of her correspondents, is SO much more appealing than the tone of this blog and many of the correspondents here.

You only have to think of how you respond to the tone of trans-activists to see what I mean – aggression and a tone of self-righteousness and blame, is always awful.
Sonya

Sonya, CONTENT of a message should be the driving force behind whether a message is worthy of attention. The moment someone dismisses the message over TONE is the precise moment that the dismisser has demonstrated that they do not want intelligent and reasoned responses to the issue. It is akin to the whole hands over ears while simultaneously going “LA LA LA LA I cannot hear you.”

And THAT is precisely what trans and their “allies” consistently do when discussion of reality is brought to the table.

Trans can put all the lipstick on the figurative pig that they want as they oh-so-delicately try to flick their hair while holding the S-curve but it does not change the reality that biology matters and that the content of the responses offered here actually matter as well. Sadly, because some want to dismiss that message over tone issues, the mutilation of perfectly healthy women like “trans*forming mom”‘s daughter will continue…with the resulting damage being difficult to repair when the daughter later regrets the ill-informed decisions that dear old mom failed in the parental duty to prevent.

Wait, she thinks that her daughter is a gay boy? Omg! I’m SO lucky that my parents didn’t know about the whole trans mess when I was a gender nonconforming child. I don’t want to know what would have happen to me. It’s scary if you think about it.

Oh god, me too sister. I was a total tomboy growing up and even insisted to my mom on multiple occasions that I was a boy, loathed dresses or “girl colors” and hated “girl” toys like dolls. Apparently those can be valid reasons to diagnose a kid with gender dysphoria! Holy shit. I ended up being a heterosexual woman with less than feminine traits, I’m kind of horrified to think that in this day my parents could have had my tits chopped off and my body injected full of hormones to “cure” me. It’s just mindblowing.

I was the “tomboy” type as well, and this story makes me sick to my stomach. I currently wear men’s t-shirts & women’s jeans; I am a gender non-conforming female-bodied person. How long before somebody asks me if I’m a “transman”?!

Well. It seems it was my comment at that post here at GT (“From Dirt – Trans Trending: Who Is Transitioning and the Violence Against Lesbians”) was the one that incensed the mother from Trans*forming Family, as I was the one who included a link to her blog in my comment. I’m rather surprised that she considers that “the most harsh criticism i’ve (sic) received yet.” (Quick side note: why does this blogger, who is such a good writer/speller/grammarian otherwise, not capitalize her “I”s? What’s up with that, anyway?) This surprises me mainly because all I did in my comment was present a timeline of her and her husband’s own actions once their child stated she was male. Yes, there was most definitely a tone of disapproval in my comment, which I stand by. But really, for the internet? And considering she’s not only injecting testosterone into her female-bodied child but about to have a non-medically necessary mastectomy performed on her as well? I’d say I was pretty damn fucking mild, all things considered. I also left this comment later in the thread, which she may or may not have seen:

Regarding that blog – yeah, I had very mixed feelings about whether to include a link or not. Even though I vehemently disagree with what the parents are doing, I…I don’t know. Maybe I’m afraid people will go there and leave mean comments? But then would reading comments from another (maybe passionate) point of view be such a bad thing in this situation, in which a girl’s body and fertility are about to be forever altered (or mutilated, which is how I feel about it)? I just really wish they would at least slow the hell down. The mother seems to really love her kids, but holy smoke – this kid seems to have a lot of underlying issues that bear examining before such drastic actions are taken, if ever. In some of the posts, however, the mom is very defensive and angry when others have questioned their actions or expressed even the slightest caution, so I doubt anything said to her would make any difference anyway.

Again: considering what vast swaths of America (and the rest of the world) would say to this woman were they aware of what she was doing, yeah, I’m having real trouble drumming up any guilt about anything I said. Sorry, mom at Trans*forming Family, but I think you should slow the hell down. Of course, I’m but a voice in the wilderness of the internet, so fuck me and everything, but you did make the decision to make a public blog about your actions. When you do that, folks is gonna talk about what you present.

In her post, she states that she wonders if she may have “made things look too easy.” I can only speak for myself, but I’d say oooooh yeeeeeah, you did. She says she doesn’t wish to present much of the inner (and outer, I’m presuming) turmoil over her child’s transition, because her child reads the blog and the mother doesn’t want to make the daughter feel as if she has anything less than her mother’s total support. I get that. But then she (the mother) needs to understand when readers are taken aback by the glibness with which the blog – and the actions spoken of within – presents itself. Hell, even knowing that there’s more soul-searching going on behind the scenes still doesn’t negate my shock at someone legally changing their child’s name a mere month after said (thirteen-year-old) child proclaims she’s the opposite gender.

“Quick side note: why does this blogger, who is such a good writer/speller/grammarian otherwise, not capitalize her “I”s?”

I don’t head shrink women but in trans culture, I’ve seen numerous MTFs online with a long history of abandoning uppercase letters online in an attempt to feminize themselves, appear smaller, less serious, less threatening:

To them, people with laydee brains can’t capitalize the letter “I” because it’s dominant, privileged, egotistical, etc. and by abandoning that you automatically transform into bell hooks and are exempt from all accusations of privilege. [Which is why I’ve always considered grammatical affectations to be serious shit worthy of criticism which always drew “why so serious?” shrugs from people claiming to “just being themselves.”]

I think this fell by the wayside as the trans population started to skew younger and they found their own grammar in the vile/die in a fire/internet speak, plus they were no longer on the defensive.

Previously you could spot a stealth by the comical “hai, i am a little girl named suzie” type posts that were otherwise expressing grown up political positions. But there’s no reason to be stealth anymore, beyond the cointelpro ops, which usually consist of blogs set up months ago that have a half dozen posts of reblogged content from trusted radfem sources.

Again, not to head shrink her, but I can imagine if one is immersed in a culture that believes in laydee brains (and swaggering brains), where people are always supposed to privilege check themselves as every moment, lowercase “I”s might seem like a decent enough idea.

Would I, as a male, be less of a rape threat if I dotted all my i’s with a little heart? I’m guessing that crowd would vote yes (provided I was part of the clique and had the right politics). How I dotted my i’s would be part of my gender identity and would be legal proof of my non hegemonic masculinity status. Or what the fuck ever. So yeah, I think this is serious stuff worth discussing.

I don’t head shrink women but in trans culture, I’ve seen numerous MTFs online with a long history of abandoning uppercase letters online in an attempt to feminize themselves, appear smaller, less serious, less threatening:

So have I! Do you think it’s possible that this “mother” is really a trans-nut father trying to complete his Frankenstein family?

Something that really bothered me at that mother’s post was how once again, women are the enemy: it’s the big bad radical feminists who are sooooo evilllllll! Not, you know, the men who are actually physically harming trans people. Nope, it’s us, the women, the lesbians. It’s just easier that way. And for those idiots out there who say that it’s our words that promote and encourage violence against trans people? That’s bullshit. Please show me the thug who beats a trans person who also reads radical feminist blogs. Please. Because that would be a walking paradox that I’d just have to see to believe. No, a thug’s reasons for beating a trans person have nothing to do with anything any woman says, believe me.

Next: the mother (she said her name is Karen) says she identifies as bisexual, but she’s also currently married to a man and therefore enjoying the privileges of straightness.
So. What we have here is a straight woman (for all practical purposes, anyway) angry at lesbians for daring to question her daughter’s choices. And angry at lesbians for not jumping right on board the trans train. Okaaaaaay. I have to wonder if Karen has at all read up on the issues of lesbians and trans folk. Lesbians being called “transphobic” (having it screamed at us, actually) if we don’t wish to sleep with someone with a dick. Or even someone who used to have a dick. Yeah, we’re no longer allowed our sexual boundaries (or desires), Karen, or were you not aware of that? Or how about the threats of violence that so many trans bloggers throw out to women? How about the fact that I, a lesbian woman, cannot attend a support group for women who have been sexually molested at my local LGBT center because the group must be open to MtT people, even if they’re 60-someodd years old and very, very obviously male. Can’t hurt their feelings now! So I’m expected to discuss my assaults (which were perpetuated by men) in front of what are basically old men in bad wigs. I know – screw me. I should just suck it up, ’cause they’re really women after all. And it’s just! so! MEAN! to notice that they don’t pass. I know, I know, I’m a just a mean old bigot, not a woman who has the life experience of being raised female and was victimized accordingly. My life experience – and needs as a born woman – do not matter, because we don’t want to be mean, do we?

Or, how about the MtT “activists” who think it’s just A-OK to have pre-op males allowed into female locker rooms? No, not just restrooms, Karen, locker rooms. So when I go to my gym, I’m expected to be just fine with have someone with a penis getting undressed next to me. My gym offers a ton of activities for families, so there are usually a ton of little girls using the locker rooms too. But I know, the MtT are really women so we born women should just shut up and give them what they want and ignore our feelings of fear and even re-victimization.

I wish this shit were just hyperbole. Newsflash: it’s NOT. You said you’d been victimized by men in your life. Then you were upset that some feminists (us) “betrayed” you by speaking out against the whole trans thing. Well, you know what? I would think that a woman who’d been victimized herself would understand why the issues listed above are, as the social-justice warriors on the funfem blogs and Tumblr like to say, problematic. That a woman who’d been victimized herself would understand why incarcerated women do not want a male who’d been convicted of rape and murder of a female in their midst. I feel betrayed by you, frankly. Obviously you do not care about women who may need space away from men. You do not care about the issue of lesbians being pressured to sleep with male-bodied people for fear of being labelled “bigot.” You are not an ally to me either. So I guess we’re even.

Damn. In the above paragraph, it should’ve read: “That a woman who’d been victimized herself would understand why incarcerated women do not want a male who’d been convicted of rape and murder of a female in their midst, simply because he said he’s really a woman so the state moves him to a female penitentiary lest he attempt to castrate himself again.” Again, not hyperbole, Karen. These are some of the things that the trans movement thinks are a good idea, women be damned.

I also have to wonder how it’s going to go for Karen’s kid when she goes to gay bars or wherever to find a partner. If she thinks radical feminist lesbians are mean, well, I’m just imagining the reaction of a gay dude when he realizes that there’s no cock present. Anyone familiar with this little scenario? Is this happening a lot yet? ‘Cause at the rate we’re going, it’s sure as shit gonna.

You can find some complaining about it in various personal F2T blogs on Tumblr (along the lines of “how dare those hot people at the gay bar call me ‘girl’ or don’t give me the time of day or worse yet give me side eye when I come in the room”), yeah. Lots of non-acceptance going on (at least people writing diaries about it, I am very much not a part of that world to know firsthand). “I was feeling so passing today and manly and then I went over there to this bar and it was all going great until I got misgendered and now I’m all depressed…” lots of tales like that.

Many of the blogs have a lot of “selfies” with the usual “sort of pass for a young teenage boy” look going on. The author will be twenty-something, but if they’re passing at all, they look about 15 and seem to be posturing to match. So they go into a bar (meaning: over-21 environment) and then are surprised to be found out? Okay.

And I can use the term “usual” because that particular look is just so common, once you’ve seen enough similar blogs. So if I – a random curious reader on the internet from a different world – can pick up on it, I suspect that people who are in the community and actually wary of the situation are also able to notice. Whether they’re polite afterward is a separate question.

Separately from that there are blogs of self-proclaimed gay F2T who say that they are very connected into the trans* scene and the queer scene but are actually afraid to hang out with “cis men” or just very much not liking “cis men” at all, which is another interesting dynamic. “I really want outside people to assume I’m part of this group, but I definitely don’t want to associate with any actual members of this group.” In which sense the T space is its own social space, I suppose.

And those are all with clothes on. There are other gallery blogs where people share photos (and the unspoken question in pretty much all of them is “so do I pass or not?”) and a lot of them are topless, you can definitely see the scars on people even years afterward in a lot of cases, on their chest. If you know what to look for, it’s there. And again, if I can tell this stuff just being a curious reader on the internet, I’m assuming that people in the community are definitely going to notice. What they do afterward will depend on them, likely as not some people will be perfectly polite and say all the right things but when it comes down to how they really view the situation, well…

In this video, a young gay guy says he’d possibly be open to having a relationship with an F2T, but the comments below the video show what he’s really thinking beneath his surface politeness and political correctness.

Middle aged dude-bros like you who have lived a life submerged in online sexual fetishism, crossdressing in pornified “woman-face” while eeking out a living on the public dole have nothing whatsoever in common with adolescent girls like the one being blogged about by Trans*forming Mom.

The “trans community” is notoriously sex-segregated, because

1.) guys like you creep the hell out of women, including women who embrace genderism. Your male interpretation of “female” is so beyond the pale that all females, always, cringe at your sexualized pornified pantomime of womanhood. Sure, you can find women that will play along, but they are doing just that. You repel them, and you always will. And much as you wish it weren’t so, you know this is true. You will demand, insist, manipulate, pressure, bully, and attempt to control women with violence. But no woman will ever believe you are anything but what you are: a man whose dick gets hard embodying the sexualized “thing” he believes females are. YOU are what women and girls transify to avoid. Girls like Trans*forming Mom’s daughter will go to any means to attempt to escape men like you.

2.) Men like you hate actual women because actual women, and the experiences and lives and perspectives of actual women infringe on your sexual fantasies of womanhood, which you have dedicated your life to. This is why men like you are so intent on silencing women, especially women-loving-women such as lesbians and feminists. This is why “transfeminists” insist that women’s liberation should be derailed and replaced with “men’s rights”. This is why aggregator sites such as “Transadvocate” and “T-Central” are 99% male and don’t feature writings and blogs created by females- even genderist “FTM” females. You guys don’t WANT to be subjected to the affront of actual female reality- even from transitioning females. And, as stated above, those females are repelled by your actual maleness. Your embodiment of every grotesque oppressive horror that actual females seek escape from.

But.

You NEED female transitioners as a female voice propping up the very thing they transition to escape. The trans politic is the ultimate sexual political codependence. The yin and the yang. The neutrons repelling the electrons and creating a magnetic field. lol.

But what men like you need most of all to reach your full potential as lifestyle gender sexualists is “transgender children”. Autumn Sandeen and Trans Youth Family Allies’ Kim Pearson (who has since stepped down as TYFA head) stated in their fundraising appeals that promoting the concept of “transgender children” should be the core of the trans political movement because children “take the sex right out of” the transgender movement- which chiefly exists to promote the autogynephilic sexuality and misogynist anti-female, anti-feminist platform of men like yourself.

Men who like you who support the sterilization of gay children and other sex-role nonconformists by labeling pediatric gender outliers as suffering a form of childhood disease or medical pathology that requires eugenic “correction”. Men like you who “re-name” themselves after surgeons who specialize in medical pornography.

“Marci” you are heart and soul of the transgender movement. Women and girls, including those who embrace your gender technology to escape you, are the collateral damage.

To hear you spout your disgusting reversal, categorizing women who discuss issues of critical importance to women and girls as a predatory act, or an uncaring act, or something SEXUAL and PORNOGRAPHIC is beyond ironic, sir, bordering on (or well beyond) perverse. Just yuck sir. Just yuck. You make me physically sick.

Jesus Christ, fawkes, could there possibly be MORE selfies at that Flickr page?!! I won’t even go into all the cheesecake poses by other men posing as what they think women should look like. Good God. It’s alllllll about females as sex objects with you, isn’t it? Loser.

I’m a straight, married mother of two, and while I’m tall, athletic, strong and very outspoken, I don’t “feel” like a man. I feel so sorry for these young girls who are confused by the dominant culture and not supported by their own families. Surgery and a lifetime of hormones is not the answer. There are many ways to be a strong woman (not just physically)–where will the strong, feisty, outspoken women, straight or Lesbian, come from if all these girls are enticed into becoming fake-males. I don’t believe that they’re going to reap the benefits of male privilege, and sad to say, in my experience, they almost never really pass. They’re stuck in boyhood, and not in a cute way.

“Trans*forming Mom describes her background being raised as a Christian Fundamentalist and relates her experience of receiving a lifetime of violence and abuse from men. “I had not only experienced violence, objectification, abuse, and assault from men beginning at the earliest stages ofmy life, but i had seen other important women in my life experience this too,” she writes.”

Does this Mom not think that these unhealthy experiences have affected her AND SUCH her girl child??? ????

It seems to me that this mom hates and fears being female, and is transferring this onto her daughter. I suspect frankly she’s also envious of the smidgeon of possibility that her daughter might not suffer quite as much as she has in the past, so she’ s sadistically brainwashed her daughter into being a ‘transguy’ and pushing her through ‘transition’ to inflict physical damage and pain on her female body. Talk about disordered personality.

Not even sure how to react to that… but one of the sad parts in there is she writes about if she’d “come out” as “genderqueer” straight from just being a “regular girl” she wouldn’t have been taken seriously.

That’s an indictment of some of what is just so wrong about the gender-bound society we live in.

If only we can get to that place where we can do what we want, wear what we want, without having this requirement that it somehow “match” our bodies, where liking the color pink isn’t taken to mean all sorts of extremely judgemental things about the rest of your thought processes. The idea that someone has to “come out” as “genderqueer” or claim to “identify as a male” in order to have certain tastes and interests disturbs me.

Why can’t we let people be free to make choices? Why do people need to insist on there being these weird “born that way” somehow physical justification for “necessarily” not wanting to wear makeup or be obsessed with shopping or whatever other stereotype of the day? It’s as if now we’re supposedly so enlightened for “accepting all kinds of people” but only if those people are not making any active choices at all but rather just born different colors of the rainbow and never can it change, type thing. I don’t get it.

The mom’s post about the surgical consultation is from March 2013, that is only ten months ago! A surgeon actually performed a double mastectomy on a 15 year-old child? She talks in her blog about her smooth, wide chest, so I assume that is the case? Shocking.

I just briefly looked up informed consent regarding adolescents and medical treatment and it is very fuzzy. It seems as though adolescents capacity for consent is based not on any specific age, but barring any psychiatric impairment. Anyone seeking hormones or TG surgery must first receive a diagnosis of BID, so wouldn’t this be considered limited capacity for consent? How can any quack-a-doodle doc possibly make a case for performing a double mastectomy on an adolescent girl, even those without diagnosed psych disorders? The transgender empire is built on money more than anything else. Sexism and misogyny and homophobia all have their place in the action, but these abuses will not end until the lawsuits roll in and make it unprofitable for these charlatans and flim-flam artists. My heart goes out to these kids and I hope that they have the support they need in order to externalize their shame and anger and go after the medical community for the abuses perpetrated against them.